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Deliberation of "National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace"

An anonymous reader writes "Per the Federal Register the National Infastructure Advisory Council will have a public meeting (telephonically) from 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm EST on 1/8/2003 to deliberate on the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. 'Written comments may be submitted at any time before or after the meeting.' Details can be found in text format or in PDF."

4 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Keep yer cool by XaXXon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Jesus christ, people..

    This is the second anti-RMS comment I've had to respond to in the past couple hours (first one).

    What the heck does this have to do with RMS? RMS talks about freedom of software. This isn't even related to him in the slightest.

    If you read the article, you'd see that the National Infrastructure Advisory Council "advises the President of the United States on the
    security of information systems for critical infrastructure supporting
    other sectors of the economy, including banking and finance, transportation, energy, manufacturing, and emergency government
    services." And while RMS might have feelings about this, software Freedom doesn't come in to play.

    I really wish bashing RMS wasn't so trendy on /. these days.

  2. *Ahem* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Attention American Government Officials:

    The internet is not on American soil and will never belong to any goverment, neither will you ever have the jurisdiction to secure it.

    Trying to Secure the internet is futile. The internet was never created to be regulated or controlled rather, allowed to evolve free of the contraints of the non-virtual world.

    So... I suggest the following.

    1 - Remove your heads from your asses.
    2 - Concentrate on your own Nation's concerns, like the economy, and social issues.
    3 - Stop invading not only your own citizen privacy but the rest of the worlds.

    Thankyou for your time.

  3. Isnt this plan an impossible boondoggle? by rufusdufus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My understanding is that what they want to do is require or ISPs to monitor all users and give all information to the goverment.

    Isnt this basically impossible? First off, the bandwidth requirements alone would make the process unfeasable. The whole reason the internet is a called a network and not a bus is that the information is distributed. This distribution is what makes the internet possible. Funneling all the information into centralized locations would violate the network topology.

    Next, many ISPs are not registered or licenced to be ISPs. What defines an ISP? Does my wi-fi count? Policing this would a complete farce, especially with freedom advocates taking every opportunity to bypass and befuddle the law.

    Next, any terrorists/criminal would start using (if they are not already using) at least simple encryption which would not generally be detectible by monitoring bots. The amount of effort to avoid even the most sophisticated monitoring would be quite small.

    Also, if all this data were stored up in some central location, wouldnt that be the best place for hackers to crack to get vast amounts of info? Has anyone ever made an uncrackable system connected to the public networks?

  4. To secure the national infrastructure... by dillon_rinker · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...it is first necessary to secure the operating system that most frequently is connected to it, ie Windows. There's little point in securing every non-Windows server (or even every server, Windows or not) if an insecure client platform (read: Windows + IE + Outlook) permits a small group of individuals to own enough client PCs to DOS the root servers. Or the 50 largest e-commerce sites. Or the most popular intercontinental routers. This is feasible NOW; all it needs is a determined, intelligent adversary (China, perhaps?). Even scarier is the possibility that there will be intelligent use of DOS attacks (hijacking of presumed secure connections, perhaps), but I'd rather not consider that while sober.